RAM is one of Haiti’s most successful music bands and Richard Morse is its frontman. Here Morse is our guide, sharing his perspective on his homeland with the camera. He shows us the fading glamour of his Oloffson hotel, once the haunt of celebrities, and the rickety shacks which crowd the roadsides as he drives through slum after slum.

The Hotel Oloffson was the inspiration for the fictional hotel owned by the protagonist in Graham Greene’s The Comedians and is one of the few hotels left standing in Port au Prince after last year’s earthquake.

The Hotel Oloffson is an inn in central Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The main structure of the hotel is a 19th century Gothic gingerbread mansion set in a lush tropical garden. The mansion was built as a residence for the powerful Sam family, including two former presidents of Haiti. The hotel was the real-life inspiration for the fictional Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene’s famous 1966 novel The Comedians. Since 1990, the hotel has been the regular performance venue of the mizik rasin band, RAM, famous for their protest music during the Raoul Cédras military dictatorship from 1991 to 1994.

I started following Richard Morse’s twitter feed right after the quake and found his tweets were giving a clearer picture of what was going on over there even better than all of the media reports. His tweets still continue to paint a picture of Haiti’s political and social situations.